Web application and website performance are critical to businesses as any unplanned downtime can lead to lost productivity, dissatisfied customers, lost revenue and more. With Cyber Monday and the holidays fast approaching, IT admins are on alert considering what this means to their e-commerce business and online user experience. In a survey* SolarWinds conducted among 71 IT professionals, 42 percent deem Cyber Monday an issue that requires proactive planning and monitoring.

Whether planning for Cyber Monday, a summertime holiday promotion or a geographic expansion, sysadmins should follow these tips to help keep websites and Web applications going strong:

1. Test the impact of changes to website from the end-user's perspective beforethe big event - Set alerts and establish normal performance baselines, then monitor each crucial step of transactions to identify problems and monitor from multiple locations to make sure all are performing optimally.
2. Ensure adequate capacity for influx of user requests - Communication among all stakeholders is essential. Talk with teams, such as marketing, to anticipate challenges from any planned activities that may drive a spike, then use monitoring systems' historical data to do 95th percentile load planning.
3. Monitor availability and performance of the supporting infrastructure - Monitor everything you can, including shared storage, visualization infrastructure, database, firewall and core network components and the WAN links to the outside world, and utilize IT staff or hosting providers to ensure any problems identified by monitoring solutions are quickly resolved.

Using SolarWinds WPM, sysadmins can continuously monitor websites and Web applications, including those that are internal (behind the firewall), customer-facing, SaaS, and cloud-based to keep a proactive watch on the end user's point of view. The latest version of WPM extends its application support to include Web-based Java applications such as Oracle forms and those served via the Citrix Web Interface.

In addition, from within the SolarWinds WPM console, sysadmins can deploy transaction players to remote locations or to an Amazon EC2 instance and run synthetic transactions from the cloud. SolarWinds WPM also records user steps for complex interactions. With the latest SolarWinds WPM, sysadmins can now:

Use new HTTP waterfall charts to isolate the Web app performance issues -- new resources also provide more granular data about individual elements on a given Web application or Web page and bubble up specific requests that are having issues

SolarWinds WPM is part of a comprehensive application and server management portfolio including server solutions such as:

*The SolarWinds survey was conducted October 8 through October 26, 2012 via an online survey service, resulting in 71 survey responses. SolarWinds awarded five (5) survey participants each a $50.00 Amazon gift card with the approximate retail value of $50.00 USD in a random drawing of all entries received.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing for SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor starts at $1,995 for up to five recordings. For IT professionals interested in unlimited monitoring, users can purchase SolarWinds WPM for just $28,995. All license tiers include a year of maintenance. For more information on SolarWinds WPM or to download a free 30-day evaluation, visit the SolarWinds website or call 866.530.8100.

Supporting Quotes

"We started using SolarWinds WPM to monitor a single transaction and it was up and running in 30 minutes," said Evan Marks, Infrastructure Manager at COCC, an IT service bureau in Connecticut. "Now we are doing much more -- we monitor multiple transactions over a variety of applications including image retrieval, e-statements and financials. WPM can really help identify areas where performance improvements are needed, allowing us to be proactive in providing our customers with ever-increasing levels of availability."

"Sysadmins dread unpredictable influxes of traffic to their websites and the chaos it could potentially cause," said Denny LeCompte, VP of product management at SolarWinds. "SolarWinds SeUM provided easy-to-use synthetic transaction monitoring for web applications, and now, as SolarWinds WPM, it offers even more Web monitoring capabilities that can help during the holiday shopping pandemonium."

About SolarWindsSolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses. In all of our market areas, our approach is consistent. We focus exclusively on IT Pros and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. SolarWinds delivers on this commitment with unexpected simplicity through products that are easy to find, buy, use and maintain while providing the power to address any IT management problem on any scale. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our online community, thwack, to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process. Learn more today at http://www.solarwinds.com/.

SolarWinds, SolarWinds.com and thwack are registered trademarks of SolarWinds. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification purposes and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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